Posted on 09/24/2015 2:17:48 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
We all remember the promise – President Obama famously told us time and time again that ObamaCare would lower health insurance premiums by $2,500 a year for families. But unless you’re receiving a giant subsidy from the government for your insurance, you’re not paying less in premiums, in fact, for employer sponsored plans, premiums have risen nearly $5,000 since Obama promised to cut them. What about deductibles? They haven’t decreased either. But don’t just take my word for it.
A new survey finds that in 2015 deductibles on employer-provided health plans actually rose by almost nine percent.
According to a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust, the increase brings the average deductible that workers must pay for their health insurance plans to $1,077; more than triple what it was a decade ago. As reported in the L.A. Times, “That is seven times faster than wages have risen in the same period.”
Kaiser Family Foundation president Drew Altman said, “It’s a quiet revolution. When deductibles are rising seven times faster than wages … it means that people can’t pay their rent. … They can’t buy their gas. They can’t eat.”
As a comparison, “workers’ wages increased 1.9% between April 2014 and April 2015, according to federal data analyzed by the report’s authors.”
The news is also bad for family plans as, the “average family plan cost workers $4,955, up 3% from last year.”
This is a significant problem for families trying to make ends meet.
Employers’ rising health costs are often singled out as a cause for stagnant wage growth in recent years, as businesses have put money into health benefits that might otherwise have gone to workers’ paychecks.
There is also growing evidence that the steep rise in deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses such as co-pays are preventing workers from benefiting from the overall slowdown in healthcare cost growth.
Even the left acknowledges that workers are getting the short end of the stick, saying that workers are having the higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs passed on to them from their employers.
Unaffordable deductibles are also emerging as a major issue for health plans being sold on marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act. The marketplaces, now in their second year, were designed to help people who don’t get health plans through an employer.
Most of the nearly 10 million people in marketplace plans qualify for subsidies to offset their premiums, but deductibles in many plans are thousands of dollars.
Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, the largest state marketplace in the country told the L.A. Times that “Deductibles are a big problem for consumers.” He’s right. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “The average deductible for a silver plan on marketplaces nationwide this year is more than $2,500.”
If you’re already paying a couple of hundred dollars a month for your mandated health insurance and have a large deductible, you could be out nearly $5,000 before your insurance even kicks in. If you couldn’t afford insurance before ObamaCare, this likely isn’t affordable either. At least before ObamaCare, high deductible policies had low monthly costs, and a wise consumer could save the money they weren’t spending on high premiums. But those plans aren’t ACA compliant and are no longer available.
With many companies subject to the upcoming “Cadillac Tax,” in 2018, the health care costs for American workers are likely to continue rising. The promised $2,500 savings is nowhere in sight and this latest survey once again shows that the “Affordable Care Act” has made health insurance more unaffordable than before.
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Kristina Ribali is the Senior Coalitions Director for The Foundation for Government Accountability.
The "leftists" only acknowledge this because they're going to go after the employers next as the boogeymen in this whole debacle...
More "class warfare"...beyond sick and tired of those bastards in DC...all of them and especially the USSC for not stopping this abomination in its tracks when they should have.
I think you're wrong about this. Obamacare has had a major impact on employer-sponsored plans. Many of the less expensive plans that were available to employers prior to 2010 aren't available anymore. Obamacare didn't just require individuals and employers to buy medical insurance; it also included a whole host of mandates for what the insurance coverage had to include.
Let’s call it what it is:
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
Democratcare
No Republican touched it. It was 100% a Democrat bill.
Typical. Blame others for the evil they inflict.
I can’t say I’m surprised.
Didn’t supporters of Obamacare promise that this would never happen?
I predicted back then that the GOP would never overturn Obamacare even if they had the power to do so. I hate being right.
So, where is all of that money going? And who is it going to?
I guess that when the government requires that you purchase a product from a private entity, that private entity will wring every nickel that they can out of people.
Man, I wish that I had a business that can use the government to force people to purchase my product at gun point, and I would be able to set my own price at whatever I desire it to be.
The perks of being a crony.
True that there are more mandates, but the reality is that most employer plans far exceeded the mandates already. It's hard to imagine an employer provided plan that didn't cover maternity care, for instance.
Medical cost inflation has been running at historical lows. I certainly don't give the ACA the credit but the fact is increased health insurance costs for employees are due to employer decisions, not any laws or underlying cost increases.
When you receive your health insurance bill, remember that contraception is required by the government from your healthcare provider even for involuntary anal sex!
Medical cost inflation has been running at historical lows. I certainly don't give the ACA the credit but the fact is increased health insurance costs for employees are due to employer decisions, not any laws or underlying cost increases.
Medical cost inflation has been running at historical lows because with rising deductibles people can't afford to pay for their medical care even when they ARE covered. That's exactly what the article is saying. What's the point of paying $X per month for insurance coverage (regardless of whether the employer or employee pays for it) if you have to run up several thousand dollars in medical bills each year before your insurance company covers anything? Watch this thread for a few hours, and you'll probably read several posts from people who stopped taking medication simply because their insurance plans wouldn't pay for the prescriptions anymore even if the medication was actually covered under their plans.
The insurance premiums are being paid for coverage of people who are healthy and don’t actually need the insurance ... so the insurance carriers can pay the medical bills for older/sicker people whose premiums are far less than the cost of their medical care.
And they were promised up to 20% profits. Of course, Obama and the Democrats sold that as “no more than 20% profits” but what’s the difference? Who else can make 20% on other people’s money every year? Lest there be no doubt why the insurance companies were for it, and why their stock prices rallied after it was passed.
as a provider I am seeing people who have to max out their 3-6K deductibles before coming in. And some of these poor souls do it in the first quarter or the year. Young families are struggling
Yes, I know that.
What I’m pointing out is the COST of treatments and services before vs. after the advent of obamacare.
The costs are outpacing inflation, regardless of government mandates. Obamacare has made it that much more worse.
So the question is: how do we get the costs of healthcare for people who pay for their own way back down into affordable territory?
Our premium stayed the same, but the deductible went up almost 40% and we dropped to a Bronze plan at work. They will not be able to hide the increase next year. Our co-pay for next year is 20% for almost everything with a $4000 deductible per person.
That's why there are some health care procedures whose costs have gone down over time because they aren't covered by insurance and therefore people must pay for them by themselves. Elective plastic surgery and Lasik eye surgery are two perfect examples of this. If a Lasik procedure costs $25,000 then hardly anyone would ever opt for it. But doctors had an incentive to get it down to a manageable price because they'd end up doing a lot procedures that way. In effect, direct payments from patients makes the health care system operate much more closely to a tradition business model where prices actually decline over time.
In the group health market insurers look at the demographics of the group, in this case employees, and quote rates appropriately. In your hypothetical they would indeed have to offer OB/GYN coverage but would discount the cost to $0 based on the demographics.
Medical cost inflation has been running at historical lows because with rising deductibles people can't afford to pay for their medical care even when they ARE covered.
This is another of my pet peeves. There's a lot of talk about rising deductibles, but in the individual market that's strictly a matter of consumer choice. Every exchange offers a range of plans, some with very high deductibles and some with almost none. Of course, the premiums also vary just as widely. It's up to the consumer whether they want cheap premiums or low deductibles.
In the employer market the deductible is strictly a decision made by the employer, and the trade off is the same - lower deductible, higher premium.
One caveat is that most of my experience has been with larger companies and I'm extrapolating what I know about that market to the employer market as a whole.
My main point is that the employer market is a completely different animal than the individual, and for various reasons people conflate the two when it suits their purposes.
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